an ordinary blog — andr3.net

Just in case you've been living under a rock, I'll break the news. Opera announced last week that they have submitted a complaint to the European Comission against the ever-so-fashionable-to-hate Microsoft.

The reason? Internet Explorer aka the Devil's Offspring: Microsoft's monopolist strategy to limit the users' choices and also their Web Standards support... or lack thereof.

Opera requests the Commission to implement two remedies to Microsoft’s abusive actions. First, it requests the Commission to obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop. Second, it asks the European Commission to require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities.

Read the full press release.

In short, they want Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or supply alternative browsers. They also want Microsoft to put their money where their mouth is and start supporting standards, for real. I, for one, am still waiting on a fully XHTML capable Internet Explorer. Maybe in March.

Whoa! Can't go wrong there, can you? Who doesn't love to see any given corporation sticking up to Microsoft?

Well, it's not that simple.

No matter how much you curse at Microsoft every time you bump into a bug in IE. Neither does it matter how much you support webstandards. I'm not questioning those things. Despite all that, this action cannot be taken lightly. Just like Andy Clarke points out in his CSS Unworking Group, Opera and Microsoft are both in the CSS Working Group, which is currently working on the CSS3 specification. Are things going to be affected by the outcome of this legal action? Who knows... And are the browser vendors the people we want in charge of building the next batch of standards for our dear web? Makes you think, doesn't it?

Furthermore, the whole press release stinks of a cheap publicity stunt. Right on the first paragraph they call themselves the only company that can put the Web on any device. Not only that, they also sprinkled the press release page with links to their products. To top it off, the "About Opera" text they have been including in their previous Press Releases has been re-done.

They have every right to brag. They have, indeed, been doing remarkable work in bringing the web to mobile devices and game consoles. Well done there... but those are just some of the reasons why this whole thing makes me suspicious.

As far as the complaint goes, I still think an operating system without a browser is incomplete, specially nowadays. Either they start carrying binary versions of other browsers in the OS installation disk – which would get stale very fast – or they force the user to download the latest versions, which adds a requirement to have internet access before having a browser.

Regardless of the technicalities... I'd like to leave a question for you all to think about.

If the lack of choice in Windows environments are annoying them so much, why aren't they filing the same complaint, only targeting everyone's beloved Apple?

Last post on the subject of Codebits, I promise.

I'll dive right in. Here's a basic overview of what I did over there.

First, I'll leave you a quick index, to help you navigate through the post: Mobitags — GeoTourism — Estante.
(be careful when using inside an RSS reader, it will take you to my website)

As soon as I sat down in front of my trusty laptop (soon to be replaced, sorry dude) I went through my notes to see what idea I would pick up first. I had scribbled down on my moleskine a couple of ideas I had had through the previous week. First up? A very simple script that grabbed a feed from a user of SAPO Tags (sort of del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, the latter being my favorite) and display it using QR codes. Thus came to be...

Mobitags!

I'm not very imaginative when it comes to names, I know.

You can see it working here: http://codebits.andr3.net/mobitags/.

Here's a screenshot:

Click for a bigger version. Use it with a Phone + Kawya Reader to see it action.

read on about: SAPO Codebits: it's all about the code!

It was 2.5 days of pure geekness. The event ended yesterday, but I couldn't come straight to the computer and blog because, well, I only ended up sleeping for 1 or 2 hours. I must admit, the practice given by the University projects, all-nighters pulled until the deadline of many a project came in handy yesterday.

As an Internet event, it's safe to say it was the best ever. There's more to us - Portuguese - than just plain gamers that fill LAN Parties ever since the 90s. We saw many projects presented at a fast pace (90seconds), with some unavoidable technical glitches.

But before writing about what I did, let me give you my overview of the event. I'll try to keep it short.

read on about: SAPO Codebits ended, echoes will continue

Just letting you guys know I'm having a blast at Codebits. Wonderful environment for coders. All the experts are here... Ruby, PHP, Perl, Javascript... you name it.

Congratulations are – already – in order to the organization. Everything is running smoothly and the hunger I had to endure at Lan Partys, back in the day, is nothing but a sore memory.

I'll let you guys know what I come up with in the end. I already have one very simple "hack" to show for, but still working on some more. The night is young.

Oh, if you see me, come and say hello. See my profile @ intra.codebits.sapo.pt. amazing work by pecus on the backend. xfn, hcards galore!

And for you out there, check the video feeds (only live during the event, of course):
2nd floor (where I usually am)
1st floor

(Last week's news, but still...)

First of all, it's a misleading name — Open Social. After they got Brad Fitzpatrick, author of the iconic Thoughts on the Social Graph, by choosing this name people get the idea they may be attacking the concepts described in that article.

But they're not.

What is it, then?

In short, Google's Open Social are APIs which social networks (Hi5, Last.fm, SAPO Spot, etc.) may choose to implement to allow third party developers to create web applications that will run on their users' profiles. In layman's terms, it's a way to do what Facebook did, but for all social networks out there who decide to jump on the bandwagon, only with a certain twist:

• Open Social is a javascript API
• Doesn't require developers to learn specific languages (like in Facebook)
• Doesn't have the lock-in factor that fb does
• Every social network can now choose to implement it allowing all webapps written for Open Social to be "ported" to their network!

It doesn't solve the utopia dream desire for each user to truly own their online identity & relationships, nor does it solve the problem of portability, at least not out-of-the-box.

read on about: Open Social: my €0.02

Mininova: Search for 'radiohead'

Could someone please explain me the reasoning which lead these +2000 people to download an already free album? Giving away free music is not enough to keep your music off the p2p networks.

Possible explanations

(leave your suggestion in the comments)

• Bandwidth caring fans want to take some weight off the servers
• Revenge companies who now hold a grudge against this initiative might have inserted fake torrents to dismay some fans, but why so many seeds??
• Speed faster than downloading from a single server? I've tried it and their server is pretty fast.
• Old habits die hard?
• ...?

Almost an exact year after I launched mobifeeds – missed it only by two days –, the pet project of André Ribeirinho saw the light of day!

Adegga is here to help you spread the word about great/poor wines you've tasted and also learn a lot from others. Social discovery of wines, as they put it, based on a variety of tools common to other social networks. They guys have it pretty much covered. read more about it on their about page

I've been testing it since June and it was fun watching them rough out the edges. Personally, I'm not much of a wine connoisseur, but I do like to taste a good wine now and then. I'm actually looking forward to start building up my wishlist based on what I read in there.

This project hasn't been a secret for quite some time now and I know I am not the only one pulling for this project. Between you and me, this means a lot more than meets the eye. Portuguese developers (aka possible start-up-ers) have been looking at this project as an example of someone who had the guts to take the plunge from a stable day job to a do-or-die startup, backing up a project he believed in. It's like an inspirational tale, is it not?

Anyway, all the best to André Ribeirinho, André Cid and Emídio Santos! I'll be spreading the word as much as I can, folks.

It's invite only, for now. I have a couple so if you want me help you out, leave a comment with a valid email (not published). If I can't provide you with one, there's always inviteshare.com. I've requested that they add Adegga. Should be up soon, I expect.

The WebKit project, the engine behind Safari, has announced recently that they've added support to the controversial Downloadable Fonts aka @font-face. I'd venture to think that the article: CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing by one of the Founding Founders of CSS at A List Apart had something to do with it! (Pure speculation, mind you.) Read it, if you're not aware of the issue.

Of course, the web is getting mature and we're still stuck with Arial, Trebuchet, Verdana and very few other safe fonts (see Typetester by Marko)! It's time to go forward crazy and let the web evolve!

Yes, the controversy is still there, font foundries will get their panties up in a bunch over this. Downloadable fonts means the font files have to be downloaded and that brings up important legal issues. Does the publisher have the right to distribute those files? What about nicking expensive fonts off of websites which use them? Not good for business.

Also, there's the Comic Sans syndrome. I can't believe I just used that, here. Kids will be turning the ugly to inconcievably uglier! Using their "glitter" fonts and other typographic atrocities.

But I just want to share two quotes with you, which totally reflect my thoughts on the subject.

John Hicks:

Personally, I’m just happy that we’re reaching a point where we’re having this conversation! I want to be able to specify a face, and enable everyone to see it, without resorting to the image replacement and SiFR workarounds.

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/fonts-in-your-face

John Gruber:

The conundrum is that most of the fonts worth using can’t legally be shared as free downloads, and most of the fonts that are legally shareable aren’t worth using.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/october#thu-04-coles

First Opera announced it on @media, now WebKit gets behind this too.

One more thing...

As if that wasn't enough to bring you fuzzy feelings, Native DOMContentLoad event is coming to WebKit, as announced by Simon Willison. Great news, as well! It's a much needed native event! Is the W3C listening? ;)

In full: ↓ Future of Web Apps 2007 and ↓ Fundamentos Web 2007.

Once again, the Future of Web Apps went by and I missed it! This time around I didn't sweat it, because if all goes well, I'll get the conference-in-a-box edition. Hope so.

I won't go through the entire schedule, but I'll try gather as much links as possible I find as the aftermath of the event.

• Slideshare FOWA07 group, hopefully it will grow.
• James Galvin speaks his mind, includes diggnation episode recorded at fowa07
• Andrew Bates summarizes Dapper presentation
• Andrew Bates summarizes Pownce presentation
• Andrew Bates summarizes Paul Graham's Presentation
• Steve Souders present High Performance websites, video not from FOWA but apparently it was pretty similar.

I'll update the list as I go. Suggest links below, in the comments. Thanks.

First of all, I find it weird that two conferences so closely related were scheduled to the exact dates. I'm sure some people wanted to attend both but were forced to make a choice.

Anyway, let me just say I find it amazing to see such names as Tantek Çelik, Jeremy Keith, Jeff Veen and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (even if only his virtual-self was there) being part of a conference just next door to Portugal. Hopefully we can also get some high-profile speakers like that to visit our modest little country. ;)

Moving on, I've scoured the web looking for presentations, blog posts, etc., but so far, I haven't been that lucky. Let's see:

• Bulletproof Ajax (Jeremy Keith), notes by Daniel Burriel
• Bulletproof Ajax (Jeremy Keith), notes by José Pita
• Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps (Jeff Veen), notes by Daniel Burriel
• Reflexiones después de Fundamentos Web 2007, some thoughts about the conference (Spanish)
• Después de Fundamentos Web 2007, again thoughts about the conference (Spanish)
• La web que viene, in El Pais (Spanish)

Babelfish is your friend.

I'm sorry for not having any more presentations to post, but if I find them, I'll update this post and save them to my Ma.gnolia. So check back later or follow the RSSes (blog, lifestream).

Feel free to contribute some links, just spit them over to the comment box, below. Cheers.

Today I spent the whole dinner reminiscing over Monty Python's greatest sketches and britcom legends in general when it hit me. Not many people know that many stand-up comedians, even though most appreciate the shows we have here in Portugal – and boy, do they fail short in comparison to the great masters. (ok ok, not all of them)

So starting today I'll share a couple interesting comedians now and then and hopefully, I'll discover some more in the process. Feel free – actually I thank you if you do – to share some of your favorite stand-up comedians. Specially if you have links to their videos.

Anyway, moving on to my first choice.

Eddie Izzard — The European

From the get-go you'll notice one thing so let's get that out of the way, quick. The dude is a dudette! Yes, he's a transvestite. A transvestite executif, he prefers. But if you ask me, that's the first and last time you'll ever think about that. As he put it in one of his shows: Women wear what they want and so do I.

I find his humor quite unique. He's able to use great events in our History and turn them into well thought jokes. From Alexander the Great to the Death Star. ;) He also includes in his shows a lot of his views on Europe and he's really passionate about it. (for more read this interview on The Independent by Bono). He tends to make elaborate skits that end up teaching something to the audience. He had the audacity to while doing a show in the US and speaking of the IRA in Northern Ireland turn to the audience, sigh of relief and: Do you even know these other countries?

So what's the better way to show off a comedian's style? Videos. So here are a personal selection of some of his best videos I found on the web.

Videos

Death Star Canteen, from Dressed to Kill

↑ link to the video on YouTube

Stonehenge, from Dressed to Kill

↑ link to the video on YouTube

Popes (2002), from Circle

↑ link to the video on YouTube

Being bilingual, from Dressed to Kill

↑ link to the video on YouTube

For more, try searching YouTube for 'Eddie Izzard'.

You might want to make sure you're free for a while because it'll be hard to stop.

After following closely what went down at the Yahoo! Hackday in the UK last June, I can be nothing short of ecstatic with the announcement of a similar event taking place right here, in Lisbon!

It will be on the 13th, 14th and 15th of November at the Gare do Porto de Lisboa and it will be made up of presentations, workshops, insomnia (lots, hopefully!), contest and a concert! The contest will run for 24hrs to see who can come up with the best hack/mashup/project/whatever! If you're a developer, have a look at the – very original, I must say – SAPO Codebits website to learn more about this event. There's a blog too.

Obviously, by looking at the name, anyone can tell it's backed up by the almighty SAPO who will put a variety of webservices at everyone's disposal! Should be pretty sweet, given the variety of services they provide, everyone should have plenty of mashups to choose from! The secret ingredient will be, surely, imagination.

This comes at an interesting point, since the debacle of Minho Campus Party showed we've all had our share of LAN parties. This event, takes a huge spin on the concept. Drop the games and put in programming. But leave the fun in the mix! This event will educate whilst promoting the development of longly incubated ideas which can bring out great things into the open, I believe. I, for one, am already sorting things out in my head... How about you?

Oh, of course, I've signed up! I couldn't miss this opportunity, specially since it's just around the corner! The event is limited to roughly 400 people, so if you're interested in technology and also thirsty for knowledge, don't postpone it... sign up now!

I gotta mention the website again. It was great to see a whole website navigable via a command line! Specially when their target is... well, developers! If you can't navigate through the site like that, then this event is probably not for you! Well done, guys.

Event details

Whenever I'm discussing the concept of microformats, one of the most recurring questions is:

What's in it for me??

If you're a publisher, the answer you're looking for is in the answer to the question What's in it for the users?. You'll enable your users to extract semantic meaning and take it wherever they want. If your company has an ecosystem of services, like Google has, they can take your semantic data – as well as data from the entire interweb – and inject it on your own services (Google Calendar, for example).
To top it off, it's not even that hard to implement. But I won't go there today.

So I thought it would be interesting if I had somewhere to point to when I wanted to show someone how great this is from the user perspective. So I made a screencast, available down below.

Before you jump at me for not using the most used browser at the moment, let me just go out and say this: I used Mozilla Firefox and the Operator extension by IBM's Michael Kalpy. But please, bear in mind that this issue is being followed closely by the fellows over at Mozilla and Firefox 3, the next grand release, will support this out-of-the-box! That's a huge, tech-savvy crowd with easy access to these features.

IMHO, the rest of the browser vendors won't be allowed to take much longer. Microformats are here to stay and they have some heavywheight entities backing them up. For more on this, read this post: Microformats: getting mainstream? by Pedro Custódio.
Also, even if you-know-who doesn't give a crap about this, there's plenty of toolbars going around. One of them is bound to start supporting this. My money is on Google's, but feel free to prove me wrong guys.

Enough babble, let's just jump straight to the video...

Screencast: What's in it for me?

http://screencast.com/t/lcf6aShStSu

Sorry for not having an embeddable flash screencast. Maybe next time.

Related Links

• microformats.org - everything you need to know.
• Operator extension for Firefox
• Tails Export extension for Firefox
• Join the discussion!

After countless all-nighters, some pretty challenging projects, "some" great teachers and painful final exams I can officially say I'm done with college. It's been a hell of a ride, that's for sure. Funny, I thought I'd feel more ecstatic when the time came, but still I won't be fooled - it is a major milestone in anyone's life (even though it's more and more common these days).

Ever since I got that last grade, a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders and the last comic strip of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes has been springing to my mind ever since:
not much for the snow part, of course

As for the future, I'm proudly part of the great ranks of PrimeIT and I'm having a blast working for one of the most exciting companies a Portuguese web developer could ever ask for.
To be perfectly honest, this new journey has started right after I left my previous position at Core Factor, but let's just pretend, shall we?
Life is good. Cheers everyone.

You know, I've never seen myself as an Apple fanboy and I'm not going to start now. Despite having a Mini at home and loving MacOS as much as the next guy, I still try to keep it sane – I own a recently purchased Creative Stone plus, far superior to iPod shuffle, IMHO. I always try to make educated decisions when I evict my money from mine to someone else's pocket. Thus, I never found enough good reasons to buy an overpriced iPod... that is, until – maybe – now.

Screw the nanos, classics and the buzz-buzz of the iPhone 24h debacle (Steve managed to clear his face a little, check the open letter to iPhone owners). I'm talking about the iPod touch, of course. iPhone as it stands now is still half the phone I need or want. But the platform is pretty impressive, specially after seeing Nuno's up close. Safari on my pocket? Hell yes.

This is not just the webdeveloper in me talking, the user craving for eye-candy is pretty excited as well. But don't get me wrong, I still love my Opera Mini, and will never ever make an iPhone/iPod touch (see how ridiculous it is?) specific website. But Safari? Damn, mobile scripting is coming and it comes in a pretty package!

So what's the title all about?

Ever since I saw the 3rd or 4th gen iPod, I had a vision and a wish. What if your portable media player was able to connect to your own computer via wifi/bluetooth and sync everything up. Calendar, address book, MP3 playlists, podcasts (please, please, make the podcasts accessible from the iTunes WiFi Store), videos, whatever! And everything as transparent as possible? Would be pretty sweet, eh?

Well, that's why Apple is coming close. They have the technology laid out and they have the balls! With these two high-end devices sporting WiFi and outstanding media playing capabilities, the time is now! Do it. Show Microsoft what a mistake it was to waste the Zune WiFi with silly DRM.

Well, for now, I'm pretty impressed with iPod touch, even if it makes me carry around another device, my trustworthy Nokia 6630. Let's just wait and see what the transoceanic flight will do to the iPhone. I hope there's 3G and decent bluetooth selling on the Duty Free of his flight.

Keep an eye out for Apple Expo in Paris, September 25-29.

A couple of days ago I was greeted with an "Account Suspended" message sitting on my mailbox. Upon further inspection I realized my hosting providers had suspended my account due to a query overloading their servers. WTF?? That's what I get for using old un-cached code with naive queries and disregard huge waves of spam-comments.

To get my site back up I couldn't just go through the entire code removing key features and nit-picking every query. Too much work and little reward. Instead, I thought it was high time I put in practice some things I'd been reading about (not nearly a large scale app, but this is as good a sandbox as any). So I whipped up a pretty basic layout, used the old database schema and overnight I had my blog up and running again. The worst thing was having Google slamming into 404 walls and losing the pagerank I'd been gathering over time.

Anyways, this post is nothing more than an explanation as to why the place is quite different and you are – for now – unable to comment (if you want, drop me a line to the address at the bottom). The reason for this is me not wanting to rush things and I really don't have that much free time right now. Working full-time and studying for a final exam is not for the faint of heart, I tell you.

But stick around. Keep checking back or update the feed link, as I'm improving the place a bit. Been sprinkling here and there with microformats and I intend to take it yet a bit further. ;)

Meanwhile, if you're interested in some bookmarks, have a look at my Ma.gnolia (rss). Also, if you want, have a peek at my stream (not really ready for the front stage yet). More on this later.

Yes. It's been a year since I took a job as a webdeveloper for Core Factor, a small company in Lisbon working on IT Consulting and Design.

If you would ask me why haven't I written about this before, I'd probably tell you it was due to lack of time or for privacy reasons... the truth is, I don't know why.

What I do know is that all some good things come to an end. Yes, as of last friday, I'm no longer a member of the team. See? A whole year just went by in a couple of lines.

From the past few months, I remember a standards-proficient conference, an online publication with a challenging IA and good, discrete use of Ajax, a very complete intranet and much, much more.

It was quite rewarding seeing a company being born. Including all the inherent difficulties and doubts around bootstrapping.

What's next?

Right now, I'm walking steadily towards new challenges, but I want to wish everyone at Core Factor the best of luck for the future. It was an exciting year, with many lessons learned along the way.

Next chapter is just around the corner. More on that later.

Even though I've yet to set foot on a conference outside of Portugal, I've followed @media events closely since the beginning, in 2005.

The @media 2007 event was split up in two distinct editions: America – San Francisco, May 24th - 25th – and Europe – London, June 7th - 8th. I'd have to say they both look very promising just by looking at the program. But that's not news, per se. The thing is, the American edition has just ended and presentations started popping up all over the web. I'll try to update this post as I find more and more, but for now, check these high-quality presentations, mandatory for all web professionals.

Download/view slides from the event

• Interface Design Juggling by Dan Cederholm
• Designing for Communication by Cameron Moll
• Microformats, building blocks and you by Tantek Çelik
• Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps (pdf) by Jeff Veen

All nice chaps, with great content in their presentations. If you don't have time enough to spare for all of them, I'd recommend having a look on Dan's and Cameron's. Top notch stuff.
Also, enjoy some photos of the event:

Photos

• persistresist's set of @media 2007 America on Flickr

maximizer — one who maximizes the browser window.

Roger Johansson posted a poll a couple of days ago with the intent to learn how many people usually maximize their browser windows.

He has just posted the results and I thought I'd share them with you.

Do you maximize your browser window?

A tie!

Overall results:

• Yes 50.4%
• No 49.6%

Maximizers by Operating System

• MacOS 20%
• Windows 65%
• Linux 64%
• NetBSD 33%

read on about: Maximizers by Operating System

If you have ever picked up a book about Distributed Systems you'll see that throughout history we've been passing weight from the client to the server and vice-versa. These days we are witnessing yet another shift.

Last week I was attending the Usability Seminar here in Lisbon, organized by the APPU (Portuguese Association of Usability Professionals, roughly translated) – great event, by the way – and when the discussion was launched with Adobe's Apollo and Joyent's Slingshot logos on screen I thought, you're kidding me right? Why? Because I just can't seem to get what all the fuss is about! (And I know I'm not the only one [portuguese])

read on about: Merging online and offline experiences

On their April issue, they include a wonderful section, which I strongly recommend:

The 100 Greatest Singers & their 1000 Greatest Songs

I won't give you the top slots here – maybe in the comments – and I won't get started on which singers who didn't make the countdown should have... I'll just copy the line they used to describe Janis Joplin:

Sandpaper-larynxed '60s wild child.

Best. Short. Biography. Ever.

First of all, I doubt there are still any real subscribers to the feed, but if there are i'd appreciate if you'd make yourselves noticed. I'm not sure whether I still have an audience or all the hits my feeds have been getting is search engine crawlers. The spam keeps getting in but my posts don't. I've always said I'm not an ambitious blogger and the truth is that some changes in my life made me prioritize and blogging lost some importance/relevance.

Still, like I said when I launched mobifeeds, I won't close the blog because every once in a while I come up with a little something I'd like to share with the world. This time, is no different.

Digg - direct links feed

Being an avid Digg reader and a rare participant of the community sometimes the last thing I want to read is the stereotypical – and at times, very predicting – comments of some less inspired members. I just want to read the article!

So, I wrote a small script that basically removes the need to actually GO to digg's page to jump to the article at hand. It still presents a link to the digg page as well as some cache options (duggmirror and coral cache), in case the page has been dugg.

All you need to do is replace the feed address http://digg.com/rss/index.xml in your favourite feedreader (or startup page, like netvibes) with http://digg.andr3.net. Simple, eh?

I had this working a long time ago and at the time I shared it only with some close friends, but then digg changed the layout and the scraping started to fail. I never went around fixing it but now that I did, I thought I'd lay this here for all the visitors the search engines bring here.

That's all for now, see you all next year... or maybe not.

Much has been said about the whole Web 2.0 paradigm. Release early, release often, label it beta and go ahead without fears. Me, being a bit of a perfectionist, have found some problems implementing those guidelines.

The truth is that I have been working on a little service for over a year – on and off – which I have so cleverly named mobifeeds (I've never been the best at naming things). As you can probably hopefully tell from the name, it's a service that allows you to read any feed from a mobile device.

Why?

I don't expect people to use this service as their main source of news, but I do feel – and I've felt that need myself – to read some news/posts while going to work or waiting for the bus. This is an almost free way (depending on your operator gprs rates) to get access to all the news/blog posts you want, right in your mobile. If you have an RSS feed for the movies showing at particular theatre, it's a cheap way to get it anywhere you go. If you're a blog owner, use it to track comments in your blog. Actually, the options are endless, since everything available through RSS will be available to any phone with a browser.

That's why I made the website usable both on the desktop and on mobile devices, but I expect people to use the mobile only to read and the desktop to add content to the database.

read on about: Finally launching: mobifeeds - get feeds anywhere!

I feel fine!

I know I've been absent for a long time but that doesn't mean you got rid of me. This summer I decided to get myself away from computers as much as I could and enjoy the great outdoors, so I didn't have much time to blog or do anything worth sharing. Sorry.

Aren't you at BarCamp?

Yeah, I know I said I would be... and I even wrote myself up as an attendee... but due to some unfortunate calendar-related issues, I was unable to attend.

You see, next week I've got to get rid of Linear Algebra, so I need to study hard for that – that's what I'll be doing after I post this – and since I already have two evenings reserved for my pure entertainment (Pearl Jam are coming to town, twice), I couldn't afford to lose an entire weekend worth of studying, despite of how tempting the program was. I hope they're having a good time and if I run into some nice resources (videos, presentations, reviews, etc.) I'll edit the BarCamp post and dump the links in there.

Also, it's funny that even though the site has been stopped for almost two months, I still get many daily visits (google) and I even got myself recommended on BlogDay, by Hugo at LisbonLab. Thanks for the add, dude. (that's what the cool people at MySpace use to say) I'm not so sure about the Asterisco bit, though. Not really interested. ;) And you, my fellow readers, make sure to check his log, his web log – how 007-ish of me.

Furthermore, thank you for sticking around. You know I'm not an ambitious blogger and that comes with a price... long periods of nothingness. I do have some news to share with you, but more on that during the week.

And if you're going to the PJ concert, drop me a line in the comments. And you might want to check this out. I, for one, am crossing my fingers for Crazy Mary, State of Love and Trust and Release. See you there?

Today Slashdot featured an article written by respected / hated tech-expert John Dvorak in which he states the problems with CSS. He goes so far as to state the following:

As we move into the age of Vista, multimedia's domination on the desktop, and Web sites controlled by cascading style sheets running under improved browsers, when will someone wake up and figure out that none of this stuff works at all?

Wow! CSS doesn't work?! Wait a minute, let me keep on reading.

Oh! This rant article is based on his own frustration when he attempted to redesign his blog! Amazing. He can't find an easy way to design the layout he wants for all browsers with CSS and suddendly the technology is dying and it doesn't work. He doesn't even consider the possibility that he just didn't get it!

He mentions cascading/inheritance properties of CSS to be a bad thing? It's actually one of the most powerful features of CSS in the first place! You just have to understand it and learn how to use it for your advantage. It's exactly the same as someone saying Java's inheritance and polymorphism suck because they're complicated or tricky!! Sometimes you are going to have to sit down and actually learn something. And then you're going to have to practice, and then you'll learn how to use it more effectively, over time.

All of this stems from the fact that the Web has always enabled anyone to create a webpage without understanding the technology below – regardless of the result. You grab Frontpage or Dreamweaver and you create a page. Nice. But that doesn't mean everyone should be able to grasp advanced concepts of CSS, specially if your aim is crossbrowser compatibility.

It was never easy to make one site look exactly the same in every browser. Ever since Internet Explorer 2.0 there has been inconsistencies between IE and Netscape – remember Netscape? – and it's hard to ensure that everyone implements the standards exactly in the same way. Designing for crossbrowser compatibility is hard and the best way to make it easier is for browser vendors to get their act together and improve their support of the standard. Not strike it off the map!

Please note that I'm not saying it shouldn't be easier, we all know how much frustration IE6 bring into the world of webdesign, but don't blame the entire community for that!

Dvorak, as always, manages to make silly remarks on a subject he knows little about. Sad.

As always, I'm a bit late posting this, but I'll do it anyway.

WeBreakStuff / Fred Oliveira is organizing the local event for the BarCamp Earth which will happen next August 25th and 26th September 2nd and 3rd. The venue is still to be announced, but they're aiming at Coimbra.

First of all, what is a BarCamp?

A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.
( The Rules of BarCamp )

And a little description of what BarCamp Earth is all about:

Was BarCampWorldwide – now, BarCampEarth – a simultaneous compendium of Barcamps around the world to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the first-ever BarCamp taking place August 26-28, 2006.

So, with all that being said, I take this opportunity to invite all my readers (all three of you, counting myself) to come by and join us. You've always been trying to find a reason to come to Portugal, now you have it! Steve?

I'm still not sure if I'll be making any presentation, specially since I don't feel qualified to talk about any particular subject – most of them seem to be standards-aware already. What can I possibly have to offer? If I end up finishing up a personal project – in development since last summer – I might end up doing some sort of demo of it, to get feedback, opinions and share the experience of building it.

What I am sure is that it's going to be a great experience for any person interested in technology.

So go on, write yourself in, join the mailing-list at Google Groups and see you there!

Do you know what irks me about this Press Release from Creative? The fact that even though they have the best mp3 players, receive awards in major tech websites and events, they still get trampled by Apple's fancy-looking iPod.

Last christmas I acquired a Creative Zen Micro 6GB, despite the existing hype around the just-released iPod nano. I did so because analysing the pros and cons, I came to the conclusion that getting the Zen was a wiser choice. Bigger capacity, bigger compatibility (sketchy issue, with new firmwares supporting Windows Media PlaysForSure), more features, cheaper, etc. and since I couldn't care less for the photo capability or the color screen of the nano, Zen was – and still is, if you ask me – the wisest of the choices.

Most people I talk to about this subject end up agreeing with me, but some of them still manage to grunt an But I'm still buying an iPod... by the end of the conversation. It's the power of the great strategy lead by Apple's marketing department. Apple managed to conquer a market that hardly ever enters the equations of tech companies. The Average Joe. While you see old ladies in the subway wearing their iPods proudly, you won't see the same with Creative products. Creative managed to convince the tech crowd, apparently – see the awards in the press release linked above –, but there are far more people listening to music thanus tech heads.

Creative, get your stuff together. You have good products, so get out there and sell your stuff to the wider audience. I don't remember seeing a Creative Zen in a tv show or a movie, but I do remember the 10 second close-up of Jodie Foster and an Apple 23-inch Cinema Display in the movie Inside Man. Get the Hint?

(This post is more of a rant than it is an information; most of you already know iPod is the market leader of Mp3 players, but that doesn't mean it's the best – with all the subjectivity that comes with that term. Just think about that if you're thinking about getting a new player, will you?)

ps: sorry for my absence. Been busy with a project I shall be releasing soon.

If you visit Mininova.org frequently, you've probably noticed they started providing feeds for search results earlier this month. The "problem" – not really a problem, I totally get it – is that their feed is pointing to the torrent's page and not the torrent itself. This presents itself as a barrier for programs that support RSS (such as the extraordinary µTorrent ), since they expect the link of each item in the feed to be the url of a .torrent file.

How could I make it work?

Given the awesome Mininova's URL structure, it was just a matter of replacing 3 letters. So, therefore, I give you Mininova Searches in RSS, with a twist::

http://torrents.andr3.net

read the disclaimer, this is not to incite piracy or any other legal activity, is just to provide a easier access to legal, uncopyrighted torrents in mininova. Specially if they come out periodically.

Tips

I recommend you to use Firefox Live Bookmarks as a backup, pointing to the original feed, since you won't have information about the number of seeders and leechers on each torrent. For that, make a jump to mininova before starting to download.

Feedback

You know the drill, anything wrong, shout.

It's that time of year again. When actors, actresses and others involved in the making of films, hold their breath after hearing And the Oscar goes to....

I always try to sit down and try to guess who will take the little golden man home, but I seldom get it right. Check out last year, for example. Let's see how I do this year.

I tried to watch most of the nominated movies, but couldn't manage to cover them all. Here's a list of those I haven't watched:

• Munich
• North Country
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Transamerica
• Good Night and Good Luck
• Pride and Prejudice

So with that in mind, let's start guessin' the main categories.
(here's the link for the Nominations List)

read on about: 78th Academy Awards

(warning: lengthy, nerdy post ahead)

Many standardistas and CSS advocates will answer NEVER! [google search] in a split second. But let's take some time to think about this. One of the biggest advantages of using CSS to style your hypertext documents is the centralization of the display layer in separate files. As we all know, it is a recommended practice to separate the document in three (or four) parts:

Three Layers of Separation

• Content (xhtml)
• Display (CSS)
• Behavior (Javascript)

The best way to achieve this, is to have an XHTML document, an external CSS file and also an external Javascript file (.js). Why? Simple, this way you can control each part separately. There are other advantages, such as bandwidth saving, but I'm not getting into that now.

If you want to go even further...

Four Layers of Separation

• Data (Server Side Script + Database)
• Structure (XSLT)
• Display (CSS)
• Behavior (Javascript)

For more info on this subject, read ParticleTree's article entitled 4 Layers of Separation, by Ryan Campbell.

read on about: When is inline styling acceptable?

I'm sure most of you – yeah, the whole 2 of you reading this – must have noticed that things are a bit slow around here. Indeed they are and I feel I owe an explanation to my readers, no matter how few. And I know I'm the only one to blame for that.

I've never seen this blog as a news site, nor do I want it to be. There are plenty of these out there: Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine, BBC. For that reason and for not seeing myself as a news reporter, I don't have the habit of posting every bit of interesting news I found on the web in here. For me to write a full post it means I feel strongly enough about the matter at hand to dedicate my time and my readers' time to it.

The main reason behind this place is my will to share my projects, views and thoughts on everything I find relevant. That means I won't post something just for the sake of it. I know I've slowed down, but I will eventually get back into my own pace. I just felt I needed to set the record straight. I'm not loosing interest. I'm not an ambitious blogger, I just want to be able to share stuff with my peers.

So while this is going on I have also embarked on a project that will surely update my portfolio with some work that will showcase my current skills in designing and developing accessible and usable websites. Hopefully, I'll have it up and running in about a month. Stay tuned.

Most of you must have already heard that Microsoft released IE7's Beta 2. It was all over the interweb last week – or two weeks ago –, but since I've been studying for the exams I didn't find the time to write this little piece until now. Bear with me, it's all over now, so I'll get back to my usual pace. Have some stuff up my sleeve that will hopefully spike your interest. ;)

Moving on. IE7 b2 is out and it brings a couple of interesting improvements. I'll make a small list with the links to respective post on the IE7 Blog.

• Instant Feeds ¹ – it shows a fancy page when you click on any feed.
• Zoom Feature – pretty cool. Nice to check on details of some pages.
• CSS Improvements – check the post for a list of corrections. Looking good, IMO.
• Manage Add-ons – not sure if this was already available on b1, but it's handy to get rid off some "add-ons"/spyware. You can even remove ActiveX controls. There isn't a post focusing this feature at the IE Blog.
• Searching is Better – you can add your own search engines, given they provide an OpenSearch interface.
• Favorites Center – Everything under one roof. Nicely done.
• Clear Type Text – Aha! Very well done! More on this right below.

¹ Annoyingly it overrides the XSL specification I have on my feeds. Personally, I think it's kind of rude. I can see why the end user would want IE to grab the feed and display it just like any other feeds. Why can't they display an alert box in case there's a XML Style Sheet specified? "Would you like to ignore the display rules specified on this page?" or something. I don't know.

read on about: Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2: Clear typed!

You know what they say... There's a first time for everything. So today, my friends, you will witness the first meme to ever set foot on these god forsaken corner of the web.

A couple of days ago I started seeing this Four Things meme on a couple of sites I subscribe, but I didn't think it would ever reach me, for these were big players in the webdev scene. Guess what, Steve Williams from CCCP tagged me, so I'll join the bandwagon and do it just for fun.

read on about: Four Things

Oh boy. I've been watching this whole Apple Hype as a bystander, but I've been seriously considering switching to the Mac world for a good while now. The biggest reason is MacOS X, followed by the outstanding design of their hardware. Despite that, I'm far more interested on what's inside than what's outside.

What impresses me the most about MacOS is the stability and high quality of the applications. Even the smallest app seems to be much more usable than the most engineered Win application. My main interests reside in programming (C/C++, Java, PHP, Ruby...), image editing (photoshop), common everyday use (safari, netnewswire, etc.) and also in presentations (à lá Powerpoint), but that's mostly for my brother.

I have a dream... and that dream speaks of a machine so powerful and "open-minded" that it will be able to run all three main Operating Systems: Windows, Linux and MacOS. I am aware, though, that this won't happen anytime soon. At least for me, since I'm sitting on a rock at the south-western tip of the European country where Intel Macs will take their time to become available. And it's not really clear at the moment if the new macs will be able to boot WinXP, after all...

But before going into the actual reason of this post, let me just go over what's been going on in the past few weeks in the Apple World.

read on about: These are hard times to make The Switch

I just got an email from Esteban Kozak, from SearchFox, in which he announced that SearchFox will be shut down next January 25th!

SearchFox Users,

Thanks for all your help in making SearchFox what it is. We have enjoyed providing this service, and hope that you have enjoyed using it. Please export all of your links and an OPML file with your RSS sources before the site shuts down. In accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all personal information on January 25 after we shut down the services.

Esteban Kozak
SearchFox

This saddens me a lot, since I've been using SearchFox since September last year and I've been very pleased with it. Even though they support Exporting to OPML, I'll lose the entire archive of items. This is why I'm starting to look for a replacement and one of the requirements is: I must be able to download the application package and run it on my Apache server. That way, if there's anyone to blame for the loss of data, it will be me.

All of this makes me think of Tantek Çelik's presentation Microformats: Evolving the Web at Web Essentials '05. If there was already a microformat for items in an aggregator, I'd be able to export the entire archive and not lose a byte. Is there? If there is, I can't find it anywhere.

There's an article about this on Techcrunch.

A good replacement could be feedlounge, but for starters it's a web-based solution and I'm getting tired of switching. Plus, as you can see on this Feedlounge Review at Broken Kode, there will be a monthly fee of $5. Seems like it'll be a long search, specially since I'm kind of picky about this.

First and foremost, I wish you all a belated happy 2006. Or 0x7D6. Or even 03726. Or if you're really geeky, 11111010110. I've been taking some time off the web and computers altogether, so that's why this place has been kind of slow. That and the exams have started early this time. But I'm back now, so you can expect the usual non-sense.

For those that didn't get the Halloween joke, it's a well known geek-joke which states that geeks confuse halloween with christmas because 31 OCTal equals 25 DECimal. (numerical systems)

It's the time of year for people to evaluate what's wrong in their lives and set their goals for the new year. Not that they'll actually do any of it, but it's a nice way to convince ourselves this is going to be a better year than the one that has just finished.

I'm not that much of a foreteller, but I'll write down some predictions to serve as a reference for the rest of the year. Let's see if any of these will come true or not.

My predictions

• Ajax hype will continue, however its usage will be more moderate and educated.
• In terms of webdesign tendencies, black is the new black. More and more websites will sport dark clothing layouts. I hope people will take readability into consideration though. Alternative stylesheets would be nice.
• Personally, I believe 2006 will turn out to be the Year of the Webstandards for Portugal. Towards the end of 2005, I noticed an increase of awareness by Portuguese folks. It should continue to grow exponentially.
• Intel Macs will prove to be a stunning success – unsurprisingly – which, IMO, goes to show the importance of Windows compatibility in today's life. Think about it.

Damn, I really suck at this. :)

read on about: Turning the page